Out of the Dust: "I Dreamed a Dream" (Good Friday)

After other members of her group were beaten, police officers led her into a large room.  There, two black men from the jail were told to beat Fannie Lou or face a beating themselves.  Fannie Lou was held down while the men beat her with a makeshift blackjack until they exhausted themselves.  Then the police officers took their turn.  Fannie Lou suffered kidney damage that would never heal and had a blood clot over her left eye that nearly blinded her permanently.  She was led back to her jail cell where she hurt so badly she couldn’t sit down.

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed

While she was laying in that prison cell, body still broken from the beating, she began to sing.

“Paul and Silas was bound in jail, let my people go.
Had no money for to go their bail, let my people go.
Paul and Silas began to shout, let my people go.
Jail doors open and they walked out, let my people go.”

Charles Marsh notes, “Her songs of freedom gave voice to her suffering and the suffering she shared with her friends.  Their singing did not remove their suffering or the particularities of their humiliation; rather it embraced the suffering, named it, and emplotted it in a cosmic story of hope and deliverance.”

That cosmic story is the story of Christ crucified.  Christ mocked and beaten, tortured and killed for the sins of the world, for your sins and mine.  There was a dream that was this world, there was a dream that was creation and humanity; but on Good Friday all we are left with is a hellscape of violence and death.  For God so loved the world, he gave us his one and only son; look what we’ve done.

Now life has killed the dream I dreamed…

Even still, the spark of hope that caused Fannie Lou Hamer to sing on that prison floor still rages against the darkness.  That light, though faint, still shines.  That light is grace, an invitation to wonder could there be more than violence and jugement?  Could there still be a new word?  Might the story, might the song, go on?